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Joe Guinan

Submitted by john on July 11th, 2014

Executive Director, Next System Project & Senior Fellow

Joe Guinan is a Senior Fellow at The Democracy Collaborative and Executive Director of the Next System Project. Having first worked with Gar Alperovitz and The Democracy Collaborative ten years earlier, he returned in 2012 to help design, launch and implement the Collaborative’s work on alternative political-economic systems. A former journalist, he was previously a program director at the Aspen Institute and a fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and has served as a consultant to the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. With a decade of experience in international economics, trade policy, global agriculture, and food security, he has been a frequently cited expert on globalization and economic development in major news media, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, BBC News, and Al-Jazeera. Born in England with dual Irish and British citizenship, he grew up in British labor movement circles and was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He writes regularly for progressive outlets in the UK, including openDemocracy and the journal Renewal, and is a member of the editorial collective of New Left Project.

Britain is an extreme oddity regarding privatisation: nowhere else in the advanced world is there such a willingness to sell everything that isn’t nailed down. Time and again the British public is ripped off and sold out by its leaders.

This new report from The Democracy Collaborative and the Responsible Endowments Coalition seeks to connect struggling communities to local institutional wealth through engaging student activism. The report profiles three administration-led initiatives and three student-led initiatives, as well as five potential future partnerships, where institutional investments are directed into local communities in a way that empowers low-income residents, develops small businesses, and generates sustainable economic development.

America's infrastructure is in disrepair, but the Obama administration's proposed solution emphasizes public-private partnerships with all the risks they entail. Instead, a true partner for rebuilding America can be found in the untapped potential of workers' vast pension fund assets. Such an approach could create important institutional alliances of state and local governments, public workers and labor unions, and lay the basis for a very different pattern of political economy capable of reversing spiraling inequality and displacing corporate power.

In The Economist, a look at Preston, England, where a Cleveland experiment at cooperative community development has inspired a major effort to localize the municipalize economy—one which is increasingly at the center of the economic agenda in Labour's platform under Jeremy Corbyn.

In this article, Kate Aronoff describes the feasibility of a new proposal published by The Next System Project, a vision that combines Modern Monetary Theory with the urgent need to scale down fossil fuel consumption:

For some, though, nationalization is not such a radical proposal. A new working paper from the Next System Project (NSP)—authored by Gar Alperovitz, James Gustave Speth, Ted Howard and Joe Guinan—outlines a plan for the U.S. government to take over the fossil fuel industry, using $1.15 trillion in public funds to do it. [...]

What the NSP lays out is quite a bit different. Rather than propping up coal, oil and natural gas firms indefinitely, the authors propose to “take over the companies, wind them down, and do it in a way that does not load the taxpayers with the costs....

This new working paper from The Next System Project—prepared as an invited contribution to the "After Fossil Fuels: The New Economy" conference in Oberlin, Ohio from October 6-8, 2016—explores the intersections of systemic economic and ecological crisis, and propose that only a break with the mechanisms of corporate capitalism is capable of guaranteeing a sustainable future.

Our Research Director Thomas Hanna and our Next System Project Director Joe Guinan delineate the long history of decentralized public ownership espoused by British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell: